Who Elected Obama School Principal?

Politicians in Washington have a nasty habit of assuming that they should control every aspect of life, and education is a good example. Bush thought he could demonstrate “compassion” by spendinng a lot of money to centralize education policy in Washington, so we got saddled with the No-Bureaucrat-Left-Behind education bill. Now Obama is trying to be Bush on steroids, increasing spending even more and proposing to micro-manage local school districts by dictating school calendars. It may very well be the case that summer vacations should be shortened, but that is none of Obama’s business. Moreover, the AP story on the issue notes that other nations get much better performance with less time in school – which is why decentralization and choice are the right ways of discovering the right way(s) of providing better education:

Students beware: The summer vacation you just enjoyed could be sharply curtailed if President Barack Obama gets his way. …The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go. …While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it’s not true they all spend more time in school. Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).